"Neither can I. Not anymore. The way I see it. Alice stopped existing a long time ago. Calvin killed her. Daisy's what grew in her place." Her brow furrows again. "And I think— I think I buried her for good, years later. See, Calvin never stopped attacking people. I'd check in on him on the database sometimes, 'specially after I moved down to London and joined the Met. He was careful about it. Attacked people who weren't connected to him and never left enough evidence or a credible witness. So they could never make anything stick, even though he was implicated in dozens of deaths or grievous injuries. We almost got him once for aggravated assault, but the people he attacked changed their stories at the last minute and claimed they'd attacked first."
It's hard to say if the cases really were as impossible to prosecute as the Met claimed they were, of course. It's not as if the system actually helps half as much as it's supposed to. Really, it doesn't matter why the cases never went anywhere. The end result would have been the same regardless.
"So one day, when we were both about... twenty-eight, I found him. Tracked down his favourite bar and staked it out until he finally left on his own, then beat him round the head and threw him into the boot of my car. Then I drove him out to the same spot in the woods I took you to years later and threw him on the ground. He was awake by then. There was still blood making the hair on the side of his head all tacky, but he looked back up at me and he seemed so clear-headed it almost scared me. He didn't beg for his life. He didn't even say a word. Like he'd accepted this was the end for him and that was fair play. But I don't think he recognised me. He'd changed the entire trajectory of my life and he didn't even have the fucking decency to recognise me."
There's a quiet crack as the handle pops off of her cup, pulled free by the sheer strength behind her ever tightening grip. Daisy mutters a curse and pushes the whole thing away so she doesn't smash it outright.
"Anyway. I shot him five times in the chest with a gun I'd stolen from the evidence lock-up and that was the first time I ever killed an actual human being. After that... all the little weird stuff that I'd started noticing—the teeth, the claws, the eyes—was there to stay. I've never had another scar. I've barely aged... the longest Hunt of my life ended just like that," she snaps her fingers, "and whether or not I knew it at the time, I... I made my choice, that night. I think when I buried him in those woods, I buried Alice too. And if she wasn't the one that clawed her way out of the Buried by the skin of both our teeth then she's gone for good."
no subject
"Neither can I. Not anymore. The way I see it. Alice stopped existing a long time ago. Calvin killed her. Daisy's what grew in her place." Her brow furrows again. "And I think— I think I buried her for good, years later. See, Calvin never stopped attacking people. I'd check in on him on the database sometimes, 'specially after I moved down to London and joined the Met. He was careful about it. Attacked people who weren't connected to him and never left enough evidence or a credible witness. So they could never make anything stick, even though he was implicated in dozens of deaths or grievous injuries. We almost got him once for aggravated assault, but the people he attacked changed their stories at the last minute and claimed they'd attacked first."
It's hard to say if the cases really were as impossible to prosecute as the Met claimed they were, of course. It's not as if the system actually helps half as much as it's supposed to. Really, it doesn't matter why the cases never went anywhere. The end result would have been the same regardless.
"So one day, when we were both about... twenty-eight, I found him. Tracked down his favourite bar and staked it out until he finally left on his own, then beat him round the head and threw him into the boot of my car. Then I drove him out to the same spot in the woods I took you to years later and threw him on the ground. He was awake by then. There was still blood making the hair on the side of his head all tacky, but he looked back up at me and he seemed so clear-headed it almost scared me. He didn't beg for his life. He didn't even say a word. Like he'd accepted this was the end for him and that was fair play. But I don't think he recognised me. He'd changed the entire trajectory of my life and he didn't even have the fucking decency to recognise me."
There's a quiet crack as the handle pops off of her cup, pulled free by the sheer strength behind her ever tightening grip. Daisy mutters a curse and pushes the whole thing away so she doesn't smash it outright.
"Anyway. I shot him five times in the chest with a gun I'd stolen from the evidence lock-up and that was the first time I ever killed an actual human being. After that... all the little weird stuff that I'd started noticing—the teeth, the claws, the eyes—was there to stay. I've never had another scar. I've barely aged... the longest Hunt of my life ended just like that," she snaps her fingers, "and whether or not I knew it at the time, I... I made my choice, that night. I think when I buried him in those woods, I buried Alice too. And if she wasn't the one that clawed her way out of the Buried by the skin of both our teeth then she's gone for good."